August 25, 2015

We are one week away from the submission deadline for our first crowd-sourced book, Undeniably Indiana!

Many of you responded to our previous calls for submissions, and we appreciate your support! But we still need stories about the following counties in white on this map to ensure that we have a representative collection. Can you help us turn the whole state blue?

Click to enlarge map

We could also use some more stories on the following cities:

Anderson

Bedford

Bloomington

Columbus

Elkhart

Fishers

Gary

Greenwood

Hammond

Indianapolis

Jeffersonville

Kokomo

Lawrence

Mishawaka

Nashville

Noblesville

Terre Haute

Please review the submission guidelines on our FAQ, then head to our Undeniably IndianaFacebook page and tell us your most offbeat, interesting, or unusual fact or story about something that could only happen here. We will accept submissions until September 1. We will select the best stories to publish in Undeniably Indiana, which willbe available next fall for the 2016 Indiana bicentennial.

August 21, 2015

Michael Hobbes’s Huffington Post article, “The Myth of the Ethical Shopper,” powerfully shows that we should not rely on conscientious consumption to improve labor conditions around the world. His vivid account resonates with the findings of our recent book, Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer. In chapter 5, “Apparel and Footwear: Standards for Sweatshops,” we show how the codes of conduct adopted by Nike, The Gap, H&M, and other companies have failed to alter the harsh logic of global sourcing: Price pressures are extreme, and companies have often abandoned the factories and countries where improvements were occurring. Like Hobbes, we see the trend toward “fast fashion” and complex subcontracting networks as undermining the already imperfect approach of asking large brands and retailers to be the guarantors of global labor rights.

Hobbes is absolutely right that “we are not going to shop ourselves into a better world” and that it’s been a mistake to try to bypass governments. We need strong and smart labor regulation in countries that produce apparel, footwear, and electronics. And we need government policies in countries with large and powerful consumer markets (like the US) that support this.

The question is, how do we get there? Here, we’re not quite as pessimistic as Hobbes about the potential for something good to come out of consumer concern and pressures on large brands and retailers. Let me sketch a few scenarios:

A vibrant “slow goods” movement among consumers, combined with revised ways of rating “corporate social responsibility,” could push companies to slow down the race to the bottom. Workers and citizens in China, Indonesia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and beyond have pushed from the ground up for important reforms, only to find orders moving to other countries (or other parts of the same country). The speed pressures of “fast fashion” and “fast electronics” make workers precarious and vulnerable. Slowing things down and staying put won’t solve things overnight, but it might allow the kinds of domestic reforms Hobbes champions to take hold.

Stronger expectations for corporate accountability could amplify the reforms that *are* possible through supply chain pressure. Nike, Adidas, and New Balance banned the toxic chemical toluene from their supply chains and promoted safer glues for their suppliers to use. Judging from a powerful recent exposé in Wired magazine, electronics brands need to get serious about doing the same with the solvents used to make our smartphones (which routinely include highly toxic benzene and n-hexane). Banning a few dangerous chemicals in a few factories won’t solve the problem of labor exploitation, but it’s still worth doing.

Relatedly, if laws in the US and Europe actually penalized brands and retailers for illegal actions in their global supply chains, these companies wouldn’t stand by idly as their supply chains got more complex and opaque. It may sound like pie in the sky to expect new laws that would seize goods from Target or Walmart if the subcontractors of their suppliers in India relied on bonded laborers. But this is just what has happened around the problem of illegal logging.

These are just a few possible and intersecting paths forward. We’ve seen over the past two decades that many consumers are concerned about labor exploitation, and yet many problems have persisted. The challenge is to channel conscientious consumption into more productive forms.

Tim Bartley is Associate Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. He is co-author (with Sebastian Koos, Hiram Samel, Gustavo Setrini, and Nik Summers) of Looking behind the Label.

August 19, 2015

The Latino Studies Program at Indiana University is pleased to announce its partnership with Indiana University Press in launching a new journal dedicated to Latina/o Humanities. With an ever-increasing population of Latinas, Latinos, and Latin Americans living in the United States, there is a growing need for critical reflection on how this heterogeneous demographic is shaping US culture. Chiricú Journal aims to explore this shifting cultural landscape by serving as a medium for the publication of Latina/o art and literature as well as a venue for scholarly inquiry into Latina/o cultural production.

Chiricú was originally founded in 1976 by the late Chicano scholar Dr. Luis Dávila. Primarily a graduate production at the time, the journal became a venue for the publication of poets, authors, and artists, at a time when there were few academic spaces for Latina/o cultural expression. The journal’s name captured the diverse origins of the major Spanish-speaking populations in the United States at the time of its founding: “Chi” for Chicanos, “Ri” for puertorriqueños, and “Cú” for cubanos. For more than thirty-five years (1976-2012), the multilingual publication featured art, poetry, and criticism in Spanish, Portuguese and English, including early works by Sandra Cisneros and Norma Alarcón, and rare interviews with Jorge Luis Borges and Edward James Olmos. A catalogue of our rare back issues can be viewed here.

With a new title to emphasize the plurality of Latina/o experiences in the arts, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (ISSN 0277-7223) will remain committed to the journal’s legacy by continuing to showcase Latina/o experiences in the arts while shifting the journal’s emphasis toward cultural criticism. The peer-reviewed journal will feature critical articles, interviews, reviews, creative writing, and artwork.

The inaugural Fall 2016 issue will showcase topics in Latina/o Film. Though producers often relegate Latina/o film to a niche market, this special thematic issue seeks to place Latina/o film in dialogue with key questions from film studies while at the same time examining issues of race, class, and gender from a Latina/o studies perspective. To learn more about Chiricú Journal and view our Call for Submissions, please see our webpage. For updates and announcements, please like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @ChiricuJournal.

August 13, 2015

Rosenwald, a new documentary about the successful American businessman and Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, will have its theatrical debut this Friday at the Sunshine Cinema in New York City.

This documentary by filmmaker Aviva Kempner reveals how Rosenwald was inspired by Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for African Americans living in the South during the 1900s.

In a letter on the Sunshine Cinema website, Kempner writes that she decided to make a film about Rosenwald's life after hearing civil rights activist Julian Bond speak about him and the relationship between Blacks and Jews. She goes on to say that the release of the film is timely in light of the current racial climate in our country.

"Rosenwald is being released just as we need to confront and cure the dysfunctional racism in our land. It’s time we re-work the fabric of America; remove the racist policies and practices that exist and instill some humanity. Our country needs to be washed clean of the hate. Let us collectively view this story of Julius Rosenwald, who heard the call for change one hundred years ago, and walk out of the theater motivated to act," Kempner writes.

For further reading on Julius Rosenfeld's support of African American schools, see this chapter from Peter M. Ascoli's biography of his late grandfather, now available in paperback from IU Press.

August 07, 2015

On this episode of the IU Press podcast, David Heineman discusses his new book Thinking about Video Games. Heineman's book brings together some of the most iconic, influential, and interesting voices from across the gaming industry. He reveals what he learned about the past, present, and future of video games through his interviews with gaming experts.

August 04, 2015

Calling all Hoosiers: we need your help to complete our first crowd-sourced book! In 2016, we will publish Undeniably Indiana to coincide with the Indiana state bicentennial. We are looking for fun facts or stories that celebrate what makes Indiana unique.

While we've had many great submissions so far, including a story about the northwest Indiana (AKA "Da Region"), a supposedly haunted hotel in Warsaw, and Carmel's well-earned reputation as the roundabout capital of the US, we're still looking for more submissions to ensure we have a representative collection.

Help us fill in the blanks! Do you live in one of the white Indiana counties on this map? We need a story from you!

Specifically, we need stories about the following cities:

Indianapolis

Fort Wayne

Evansville

South Bend

Hammond

Bloomington

Gary

Fishers

Muncie

Lafayette

Terre Haute

Anderson

Noblesville

Elkhart

Greenwood

Mishawaka

Lawrence

Kokomo

Jeffersonville

Columbus

Richmond

Please review the submission guidelines on our FAQ, then head to our Undeniably IndianaFacebook page and tell us your most offbeat, interesting, or unusual fact or story about something that could only happen here. We will accept submissions until September 1. Later that month, we will select the best stories to publish in Undeniably Indiana.

We look forward to working on a book about Indiana with the people who know the state best—real Hoosier residents.

August 03, 2015

When Europe Was A Prison CampFather and Son Memoirs, 1940-1941Otto Schrag and Peter Schrag

"This book takes a unique approach to a World War II memoir, combining not only the stories of a father and son, but both men’s years apart writing about the subject. . . . The dual perspectives are invaluable, and create a fresh approach to an important story." —Foreword Reviews

"Arbogast delivers a raw and honest narrative of her life as a lover, a widow, and a woman. . . . The theme of death and life, both literally and figuratively, are navigated with such emotion, it seems natural to empathize with the author in sadness, joy, love, and uncertainty as her longtime companion (later husband) Jim combats cancer. . . . An excellent choice for those touched by grief, ready for a change, or just wanting to read a beautifully written memoir." —Library Journal

"A masterful contribution not simply to the history of the civil war, but also to the history of 20th century China. A compelling narrative that grips one's attention from the outset and doesn't let go until the last paragraph." —Steven I. Levine, author of Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945-1948

Dinosaur Footprints and Trackways of La RiojaFélix Pérez-Lorente

"Likely to become a landmark reference in dinosaur ichnology. Specialists in the field and workers on the functional morphology of dinosaur locomotion will find a great deal to think about in the work. La Rioja preserves a world-class set of dinosaur tracksites, and making this information available to Anglophone readers performs a great service to the research community." —James O. Farlow

French Cinema—A Critical FilmographyVolume 2, 1940–1958Colin Crisp

This invaluable resource by one of the world’s leading experts in French cinema presents a coherent overview of French cinema in the 20th century and its place and function in French society. All entries contain a list of cast members and characters, production details, an overview of the film's cultural and historical significance, and a critical summary of the film's plot and narrative structure.

The Adventures of Jonathan DennisBicultural Film Archiving Practice in Aotearoa New ZealandEmma Jean Kelly

Jonathan Dennis (1953–2002), was the creative and talented founding director of the New Zealand Film Archive. This book presents new interviews gathered by the author, as well as an examination of existing interviews, films and broadcasts about and with Dennis, to consider the narrative of a life and work in relation to film archiving.

Italy was a vibrant center of video art production and experimentation throughout the 1970s and 1980s, attracting artists from all over the world and laying the foundation for video art as a concept in the global art and film communities. With vibrant illustrations, compelling interviews, and essays by leading scholars in the field, this collection highlights Italy’s key place in the history of video as an art form.

Animation Cinema WorkshopFrom Motion to EmotionRobi Engler

This book guides you through the different production steps of animated film making, from the creative impulse to the final editing of picture and sound. Learn the specific language of animation—its grammar and vocabulary; create your own characters—make them act to express a range of feelings.

Performing al-AndalusMusic and Nostalgia across the MediterraneanJonathan Holt Shannon

"[A] major intervention into the emergent field of Andalusian music studies: it is amongst the first full-blown anthropological studies of these traditions, and the first to attempt a cross-cultural comparative perspective. . . . [A] thought-provoking and illuminating study of the role played by the image and memory of al-Andalus in the modern Mediterranean world." —Carl Davila, SUNY College at Brockport

Building a New South AfricaOne Conversation at a TimeDavid Thelen and Karie L. Morgan

"A distinctive and original contribution, this book engages with a community which has changed so much over the past 30 years. It underscores how people, isolated in their homes aspire to turn strangers into neighbors and asks about how to raise and educate children, how to sustain a family life, and how to overcome crime." —Philip Bonner, University of the Witwatersrand

Why would a Hollywood film become a Nigerian video remake, a Tanzanian comic book, or a Congolese music video? Matthias Krings explores the myriad ways Africans respond to the relentless onslaught of global culture.

Reframing Holocaust TestimonyNoah Shenker

"What makes Noah Shenker's book so distinctive is his insistence that testimony is shaped by many institutional factors that profoundly affect whether or not a witness is 'allowed' access to deep memory. His discussion of what gets lost in the spaces between formal interviews—during breaks, before interviews, after them—is fascinating." —Edward Linenthal, author ofPreserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum

"Monterescu has carved out a domain all his own in the scholarship about minorities, ethnic conflict, and inter-ethnic relations. In this great book he once again helps us see dimensions easily overlooked in much scholarship." —Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions

HegelMartin HeideggerTranslated by Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn

The translators provide a clear and careful translation of Volume 68 of the Complete Works, which is comprised of two shorter texts—a treatise on negativity, and a penetrating reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Art and Devotion at a Buddhist Temple in the Indian HimalayaMelissa R. Kerin

"A meticulous and discerning piece of scholarship, one that is skillful in employing multiple methods—visual, linguistic and ethnographic—to create a fuller picture of a region we knew little about. . . . [A] pleasure to read." —Pika Ghosh, author of Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal

The accomplishments and enduring influence of renowned anthropologist Dell Hymes are showcased in these essays by leading practitioners in the field. As these essays amply demonstrate, nearly six decades later ethnopoetics and Hymes’s focus on narrative inequality and voice provide a still valuable critical lens for current research in anthropology and folklore.

Now is paperbackOxbridge MenBritish Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920Paul R. Deslandes

"A very welcome book that certainly reaffirms—with new material and approaches—that the entrance of women into the world of the historical university was arguably the most revolutionary event in the long social history of a special kind of institution."—Victorian Studies

Last month, I had the privilege of attending the Association of American University Presses's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, thanks to a Newcomer Grant from the AAUP and to IU Press for generously covering the rest of my travel expenses. I was honored to receive the grant and, having read all the blogs and notes from past attendees from the press, terribly excited at the opportunity!

The theme of the meeting, "Connect, Collaborate," resonated with me and with my own history at the press. Prior to becoming an employee, I gained intern experience in as many departments as I could, learning about marketing, production, design, and managing editorial, and bringing prior internship experience in acquisitions and rights. I believe both IUP and the greater AAUP are best served when staff reach out across departmental or press lines to broaden understanding of roles, to help colleagues, and to streamline workflows to meet the needs of all stakeholders, internal and external.

Once I arrived at the conference, I was thrilled to meet so many colleagues who embraced similar philosophies. I expected to gain fresh insights from the sessions, but I was completely unprepared for the intensely collegial atmosphere and the wonderful conversations that spanned all three days of the conference. I spoke in depth with recently hired publicists, press directors with over 25 years of service at AAUP institutions, scholars studying the act of publishing, and everyone in between, meeting colleagues representing presses from the UK to California.

Everyone was welcome, except the bears!

Through the mentorship program, I connected with Jessica Ryan, managing editor at Duke University Press, who proved to be extremely helpful in orienting me to the conference and open to engaging in deep discussions about how our two presses tackle similar problems. I met a number of colleagues from the UK and Canada and was impressed by their OA programs and their positive, "can-do" approaches to tackling the funding difficulties of these programs.

I also had the opportunity to talk to several directors of other presses at length and to pose my favorite question: "What was your path to your current position?" which often has surprising and intriguing answers, from the more typical director with a long career of service in acquisitions or marketing to the director who jumped right in and started a (successful) small, open access press for his university after a career in corporate management. The insights these directors learned over their careers were often quite similar, despite their different paths, specifically the importance of: encouraging collaboration across departments, watching for opportunities to align the press with the home institution, and encouraging staff to pursue innovative projects.

I'm not going to try to compress two full days of sessions into one blog post, but I particularly enjoyed three sessions:

The first plenary session featured Vint Cerf, an American internet pioneer who is recognized as one of the fathers of the Internet (You can watch the full session online). He explained that although we may feel like our digital age is making the preservation of content easy, current methods of digital storage are actually less like to survive than paper or papyrus artifacts (this is in part due to the rapid rate of development, which quickly makes software and hardware obsolete).

He emphasized that we do not need to return to keeping paper copies, but that we need to devote resources to developing technology and standards to make long-term preservation feasible for all. The current preservation of digital artifacts requires several key pieces: the original file, the software to run the file, the operating system to run the software, and hardware that can run the operating system. Assuming you have the capabilities to open the file, how do you find the relevant file in a massive electronic repository? For example, consider how difficult it can be to find an email from five months ago (or ten years ago!). Once you have the capabilities to archive electronic data, who decides which files should be preserved in the repository and which can be "recycled"?

Governments, foundations, content producers, publishers, and technology innovators will have to work together to develop a solution and to fund the implementation, but progress is being made. One team is developing a "digital x-ray" that can scan a computer running the operating system, the software application, and the digital object and then emulate all the pieces needed to open the archived object.

The Open Access Monograph panel was particularly interesting, since panelists came from university presses, libraries, and Project MUSE and engaged in a spirited discussion with the audience. The panelists emphasized that:

Presses need to educate and promote what open access really means and what it can offer to scholars (both authors and researchers).

Outside funding will most likely have to come from many sources: universities, libraries, governments, etc., and may only cover initial or short-term costs.

Presses will need to consider new services (data mining?) in addition to old (print-on-demand versions?) to develop long-term revenue strategies.

Several presses jumped in during the discussion to note that their open access models are successful now (and some claimed profitable). Instead of selling 20–60 copies of a backlist book in a year, one press had 1,500 open access downloads, and a press from Germany mentioned that their open access program was generating more sales than they had predicted. Outside of the panel, I spoke in depth with colleagues from presses in Canada and the UK who agreed that open access could be financially viable through a combination of home institution, library, and government support, a print-on-demand sales component, and the development of new value-added services for authors and researchers.

Two areas that remain a bit sticky for open access programs are discoverability and the perceptions of scholars, departments, and tenure committees. Although many libraries express support for open access, they admitted that they are have trouble getting open access materials into their catalogs and databases for scholars to find. However, one press colleague emphasized that "it is the publisher's job to make sure their content is discoverable," and another pointed out that open content creates relatability and discussion through deep linking, which will ultimately facilitate the discovery process.

Although a few attendees felt that most tenure committees don't have a problem with open access (claiming that only individual departments and faculty members still have negative perceptions of open access), everyone seemed to agree that education will be a key component of an open access program and that it is crucial for presses to demonstrate that their open access programs are not "second tier" to their "standard" programs. By continuing the university press communities' long history of rigor and excellence in the open access sphere, tenure committees will be able to trust that an open access monograph has experienced the same level of scrutiny and refinement as any other.

Finally, the Social Media/Web 2.0 collaboration lab was also a fantastic opportunity. It was a bit of a gamble, since the session description suggested that attendees be marketing staff or marketing interns, but as I hoped, my marketing background combined with a two-year focus on the managing editorial/EDP side allowed me to collaborate with marketers and publicists by building on their ideas and suggesting new opportunities that might not be as easily apparent from the "trenches."

The overarching "problem" my discussion group focused on was how marketers and publicists could get in touch with journalists to suggest relevant scholars and books that could open up trending news beyond black and white talking points. Tip sheets and emails from individual staff members could quickly be buried in a journalist's email, and collaborations between presses might not be nimble enough to provide relevant information about trending topics to many different journalists.

Our solution is to collaborate to develop a Twitter hashtag where Press staff and authors can tweet about scholars and books that focus on trending topics. As the hashtag gains critical mass, journalists would be able to quickly skim for topics they are writing about. The best aspect of the solution is that anyone—author, acquiring editor, marketing manager, designer—who spots the relevancy of a book or scholar to a trending topic would be able to contribute toward publicizing it. Of course, it's not a perfect solution and still has plenty of bugs to work out (on the most basic level, what kind of short, pithy hashtag would encompass "relevant scholarship on trending topics from university presses and sound scholars"?), but I'm looking forward to working with my colleagues to flesh it out into a real solution.

Another unexpectedly wonderful aspect of the conference was the flood of tweets pouring out of every session. I "live-tweeted" some of the sessions I attended, but I also enjoyed focusing on listening and engaging with an individual session while having the opportunity to skim the Twitter feed afterwards for key tidbits from the other sessions. If you're interested in quick highlights from any of the sessions, I recommend skimming the #AAUP15 channel on Twitter, reviewing the AAUP15 Wiki, and watching some of the slideshow presentations from the meeting. And of course, if you haven't been (or if you have), considering attending AAUP 2016 in Philadelphia!